Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown's Apocalypse
Most criticism and reflection of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young
Goodman Brown centers on a good versus evil theme. Critics also debate
interpretations of the main character's consciousness; is Brown awake or
dreaming. What is certain is that he lives and dies in pain because his
belief in his righteousness isolates him from his community. It is also
certain that Hawthorne's interpretation of Brown's "mid-life crisis" has
ambiguity and leaves a reader with many different feelings about what and
why certain things have happened. Hawthorne's use of symbolism in his
allegorical tale Young Goodman Brown causes the main character's
revelations about the sin within his community, his family and himself.
Young Goodman Brown's journey into the forest is best defined as a
kind of "general, indeterminate allegory, representing man's irrational
drive to leave faith, home, and security temporarily behind, for whatever
reason, and take a chance with one(more) errand onto the wilder shores of
experience" (Martin). Brown has a curiosity that "kills" his naive
outlook on life and changes him until his death. He has a mission to go
into the forest and meet the devil. A mission that he begins out of
curiosity and a "deep need to see if the teachings of his childhood, his
religion, and his culture, have armed him sufficiently to look the devil in
the face and return unscathed" (Hodara 1). The symbol of the forest, late
at night, can be interpreted as the untamed regions of Brown's heart where
the devil roams freely as he roams in the forest. The forest is the devil's
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Mikosh, Bert A., "A View of Young Goodman Brown."
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Faith is accepting what you are taught or told without trying to prove or disprove it, rather than discovering it through experience. Those who believe in God have faith. It has not been proven that God exists; similarly, it has not been proven that humans are kind, honest, and good by nature. Young Goodman Brown is a character in "Young Goodman Brown," who leaves his known world in Salem village and travels an unknown road in a dark forest in the middle of the night, a common motif in literature better known as the Hero's journey, and is faced with obstacles. He must decide if he will carry his journey out till the end, or turn back and not learn the truth about himself and other humans.
bitter old man who is unwilling to talk about the things that made him the way he is.
“Lead me not into temptation. I can find the way myself,” Rita Mae Brown once remarked. Temptation is all around, no matter where one might be, there is no use in going out and looking for it. For some individuals, the enticement is so strong that it has caused them to break away from the ties that once bound them to their upbringing, such as faith, but for others, it has brought them even closer to their faith. There is no questioning whether or not one would be strong enough to deny the temptation in order to remain pure, but, rather one’s faith is strong enough to go through the test that has been taking place since the very beginning when Adam and Eve were tempted in the Garden of Eden. Tone and symbolism throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
In "Young Goodman Brown," Nathaniel Hawthorne, through the use of deceptive imagery, creates a sense of uncertainty that illuminates the theme of man's inability to operate within a framework of moral absolutism. Within every man there is an innate difference between good and evil and Hawthorne's deliberate use of ambiguity mirrors this complexity of human nature. Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, is misled by believing in the perfectibility of humanity and in the existence of moral absolutes. According to Nancy Bunge, Hawthorne naturally centers his story upon a Puritan protagonist to convey the "self-righteous" that he regards as the "antithesis of wisdom"(4). Consequently, Young Goodman Brown is unable to accept the indefinable vision of betrayal and evil that he encounters in the forest. The uncertainty of this vision, enhanced by Hawthorne's deliberate, yet effective, use of ambiguity, is also seen in the character of Faith, the shadows and darkness of the forest, and the undetectable boundaries that separate nightmarish dreams from reality.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” manifests a duality of conflict – both an external conflict and an internal conflict. It is the purpose of this essay to explore both types of conflict as manifested in the story.
Both The Poem of the Cid and The Song of Roland were written in a time period where great new developments were occurring in Europe, but none more crucial than the beginning of the Crusades and the ethnocentric viewpoint they propagated and were propagated by (Quinn). Of great interest is the manner in which both works deal with the nature of pluralism in European history. For the sake of this essay, pluralism will be defined simply as a state of more than one. Both works, written at approximately the same time (1130-1170 for The Song of Roland and approximately 1207 for The Poem of the Cid, as per the book's forewords) have astonishing similarities and stark contrasts, which when put in context are incredibly revealing of their respective author's/culture's attitudes about economic, cultural, and religious pluralism.
In Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne tells the tale of a man and his discovery of evil. Hawthorne’s primary concern is with evil and how it affects Young Goodman Brown. Through the use of tone and setting, Hawthorne portrays the nature of evil and the psychological effects it can have on man. He shows how discovering the existence of evil brings Brown to view the world in a cynical way. Brown learns the nature of evil and, therefore, feels surrounded by its presence constantly.
In Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown”, he recreates a time most recalled of the Puritans: the Salem witch trials. He includes multiple historical names associated with the trial, some of them even of his own ancestry. These historical facts are important to his story because it builds a sense of apprehension, doubt and superstition in the reader, while containing tangible connections to reality. It also allows contemporary readers to examine the issues and see the repercussions of such a belief system and the impact it can and did have.
Nathaniel Hawthorne utilizes symbolism throughout his short story Young Goodman Brown to impact and clarify the theme of good people sometimes doing bad things. Hawthorne uses a variety of light and dark imagery, names, and people to illustrate irony and different translations. Young Goodman Brown is a story about a man who comes to terms with the reality that people are imperfect and flawed and then dies a bitter death from the enlightenment of his journey through the woods. Images of darkness, symbolic representations of names and people and the journey through the woods all attribute to Hawthorne's theme of good people sometimes doing bad things.
Since the beginning of the society, the forest has been portrayed as a place filled with darkness, and inhabited by the devil and other unworldly creatures. The rumors that were formed about what could be lurking in the forest were created to fill the void of knowledge of what was in the woods and to give them something to believe in. In reality, what lurked in the forest was still unknown to most people. The mystery of the forest was what people were so scared of.
searching for evil. He goes to the forest to do his deed and "he had taken a
Elisa and her husband had no children; therefore, she had no one to give her love and attention. As a result, she channeled all her attention and nurturing into her beloved chrysanthemums. Like a mother making sure her child had a nurturing environment, Elisa, "[w]ith her trowel she t...
The Song of Roland is a tale of the attack on Charlemagne’s army while withdrawling from the Pyrenees into Francia. It depicts Charlemagne as a 200-year-old “godlike conqueror” that is in the throes of a heroic battle between a rival faith, which is Muslim (Bennett, 2011). Even though the original battle was actually against the Christian Basques the story was changed when written down in the 11th century to give a rousing tale of Christendom, “brave men, true friends, and loyal warriors” (Bennett, 2011).
what he is living for, man will not accept life and would rather destroy himself than